His point was that by garnishing your wages through income tax the state was making you work for it whether you chose to or not. That forcible confiscation is, of course, backed up by extremely punitive powers.

Not unreasonably, there is strong opposition by the public to taxation - particularly very visible taxation like the council tax or its predecessor the rates.

Income tax and National Insurance, which are silently removed from pay before receipt are far more burdensome but less painful in immediate impact. Which is why Jean Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV's Minister of Finance, said: "The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing".

The Left, traditionally, have believed that you can build a consensus of support for public services or specific institutions like the NHS and in that basis justify and raise taxation. The problem has been that for at last 40 years voters have disagreed with them.

"The moralising Left and the governing bureaucracy unite to condemn tax avoidance as "immoral". The end point is more power – to investigate, to coerce."

The worldwide middle-class revolt against taxation started with California's Proposition 13 in 1978 and has not stopped since. Labour learnt the hard way in the Thatcher/Major years that British voters thought they were paying just enough tax, thank you. Scots feel the same, as Alex Salmond found in 2003 when his tax increase led to defeat - since then the SNP have been positively Blairite on tax. And Scottish Labour will discover this May that Scots may talk Left on tax but they vote Right - and their hike in the higher rate of tax will be rejected.

It is in this context that the leak of documents from Panama's Mossack Fonseca should be understood. For all their harrumphing about illegal money laundering and tax evasion, the political classes see this as a chance to attack tax avoidance - or tax minimisation as it should really be called as it merely operates in those areas where paying tax is optional.

Why shouldn't workers keep a little more of their money? Sure, render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's but there is really no need to be over-eager and to offer up what is not required or requested, is there?

The moralising about the "Panama Papers" is instructive. Money laundering and tax evasion are equated with tax avoidance. The latter is not merely legal, it is an entirely understandable human instinct.

But, the cry comes back, you must be doing something dodgy if you are doing it secretly and via Panama. Maybe so, but innocent until proven guilty and all that jazz. Also, when did a desire for privacy become suspicious? There are many reasons why ordinary citizens should be suspicious of state power - and they are under no onus to explain their discomfort. We are citizens with rights, not subjects of power.

The moralising Left and the governing bureaucracy unite to condemn tax avoidance as "immoral". The end point is more power – to investigate, to coerce.

The intention is intimidation. Both Left and Right know that in an era of globalisation free movement of capital is as fundamental as free movement of goods and services. No one is bringing capital controls back any time soon. Yes, tax havens can be pressurised and criminality exposed – just look at what the US tax authorities did to Fifa. (Though that case shows the problems too – how many people were unaware of corruption occurring in the money flows of football? There are political barriers to sorting out the sordid transfer trade, the role of agents and the dodgy money in football – not legal ones.)

But tax treaties, like any international diplomacy, takes time and effort. Change grinds through. Political crises demand instant action – often new powers. Who do we think will be subject to them? The people for whom their tax arrangements managed via Panama are a "private matter" or the easy marks – the citizen taxpayers of Britain?

"Every man is entitled, if he can, to arrange his affairs so that the tax attaching under the appropriate Acts is less than it otherwise would be. If he succeeds in ordering them so as to serve that result, then, however unappreciative the Commissioners of Inland Revenue or his fellow taxpayers may be of his ingenuity, he cannot be compelled to pay an increased tax."